New Books in Western European Studies

When Germany invaded Norway on 9 April 1940, the long lasting bilateral relations changed fundamentally. Immediately, the administration of the ‘Reichskommissariat Norwegen’ responsible for culture and therein music together with the Norwegian puppet regime’s department for culture implemented the adaption to the new, official National Socialist guidelines.The diversity of music in Norway during the occupation is presented in this book by Norwegian and German authors, confronting research on collaboration, persecution, and resistance for the first time as an international endeavour. Persecution, Collaboration, Resistance: Music in the ‘Reichskommissariat Norwegen’ (1940–45) (Waxmann Verlag, 2020) illustrates not only examples of exile and persecution and ask for the consequences of Nazi politics on prominent and forgotten fates, but depict how Norwegian artists and their organisations positioned themselves towards collaboration or resistance during and after the war, as well as contrasting it with the impressions of German musicians, both military and civilian, playing in Norway during the occupation.Including Norway into the international discourse on ‘Music and Nazism’, the articles address readers both interested in the German occupation of Norway, and the implications the German administration and its Norwegian counterparts had on the music life.This book is available open access here.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Being Single in Georgian England: Families, Households, and the Unmarried (Oxford University Press, 2023) by Dr. Amy Harris is the first book-length exploration of what family life looked like, and how it was experienced, when viewed from the perspective of unmarried and childless family members. Using a microhistorical approach, Dr. Harris covers three generations of the famous musical and abolitionist Sharp family. The abundance of records the Sharps produced and preserved reveals how single family members influenced the household economy, marital decisions, childrearing practices, and conceptions about lineage and genealogy. The importance of childhood relationships and the life-long nature of siblinghood stand out as central aspects of Sharp family life, no matter their marital status. Along the way, Being Single explores humour, music, religious practice and belief, death and mourning, infertility, disability, slavery, abolition, philanthropy, and family memory.The Sharps' experiences uncover how important lateral kin like siblings and cousins were to marital and household decisions. The analysis also reveals additional layers of Georgian family life, including: single sociability not centred on courtship; the importance of aunting and uncling on their own terms; the ways charitable acts and philanthropic endeavours could serve as outlets or partial replacements for parenthood; and how genealogical practices could be tied to values and identity instead of to biological descendants' possession of property.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the industrial district of the North Staffordshire Potteries dominated the British earthenware industry, producing local goods that sold in global markets. Over this time the region experienced consistent growth in output, an extreme spatial concentration of physical and human capital, and became home to some of the most famous Master Potters in the world. The Potteries was also characterised by a growing body of useful and practical knowledge about the materials, processes and skills required to produce world-leading earthenware. This thesis exploits this striking example of a highly concentrated and highly skilled craft-based industry during a period of sustained growth and development which offers a rich opportunity to contribute to several strands of economic and business history. This thesis presents and analyses new empirical evidence based on trade directories to examine the organisational evolution of the district. It reconstructs the district at the firm level, showing that the region’s growth was incredibly dynamic. The spatial concentration of producers and the importance of social and business networks are also explored through a new map of the region in 1802 and social network analysis. As a study of a craft-based, highly skilled industry without a legacy of formal institutions such as guilds to govern and protect access to knowledge, this thesis also offers substantial empirical and historiographical contributions to the study of knowledge and innovation during the period of the Industrial Revolution. It presents a new database of pottery patents alongside a variety of qualitative evidence such as trade literature, exhibition catalogues, advertisements and sales catalogues. Quantitative and qualitative analysis reveals the low propensity to patent in the North Staffordshire pottery industry, and provides a new typology of knowledge used in the industry. It argues that the types of knowledge being created and disseminated influenced the behaviour of producers substantially, and this typology of knowledge is far more complex than those established tacit/explicit divisions favoured in historical study and the social sciences more broadly. The findings of this thesis allow us to answer numerous outstanding questions concerning the development of the North Staffordshire Potteries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When brought together in such a way, the complementary strands of research and findings presented offer a coherent narrative of an extremely complex and dynamic cluster of production that both challenges and confirms traditional historiographical tradition concerning industrial districts.This thesis is available open access here. Dr. Joe Lane is a business historian and lecturer in Strategy at Henley Business School at the University of Reading. He holds a PhD in Economic History from the London School of Economics, where he subsequently worked before joining Henley in 2019. He is co-director of the centre for economic institutions and international business history at the University of Reading and has two current streams of research, one into patents and innovation over the long run, and a second concerning how industrial clusters as sites of knowledge creation and dissemination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Lidia Katia C. Manzo's book Gentrification and Diversity: Rebranding Milan's Chinatown (Springer, 2023) examines lived experiences of making, inhabiting and appropriating space, in relation to the upscale commercial gentrification of the Milan Chinatown. It inquires about the significance of diverse neighborhoods as emerging multicultural spaces? Are we talking about neighborhood entrepreneurs providing services and entertainment to create local urban culture, or are we talking about political/economic forces in the commodification of ethnic and cultural diversity? Starting from these questions, this book uses innovative visual ethnography and critical urban research to understand the relationship between community-based entrepreneurs, local politics, residents’ sense of belonging, and patterns of city branding strategies in Milan, the fashion capital of Italy. This book is intended for researchers and students in the fields of sociology, anthropology, urban studies, geography, and urban planning. Additionally, it is appropriate for practitioners in the fields of urban planning, housing policies, and community development.Anna Zhelnina holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and works at Utrecht University. To learn more, visither website or follow Anna on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Berlin has re-emerged as a global city in large part thanks to its reputation as a literary city – a place where artists from around the world gather and can make a life. Moving Words: Literature, Memory, and Migration in Berlin (U Toronto Press, 2023) foregrounds the many contexts in which life in the city of Berlin is made literary – from old neighborhood bookshops to new reading circles, NGOs working to secure asylum for writers living in exile to specialized workshops for young migrant poets. Highlighting the differences, tensions, and contradictions of these scenes, this book reveals how literature can be both a site of domination and a resource for resisting and transforming those conditions. By attending to the everyday lives of writers, readers, booksellers, and translators, it offers a crucial new vantage point on the politics of difference in contemporary Europe, at a moment marked by historical violence, resurgent nationalism, and the fraught politics of migration.Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, rich historical archives, and literary analysis, Moving Words examines the different claims people make on and for literature as it carries them through the city on irregular and intersecting paths. Along the way, Brandel offers a new approach to the ethnography of literature that aims to think anthropologically about crossings in time and in space, where literature provides a footing in a world constituted by a multiplicity of real possibilities.Andrew Brandel is an Associate Instructional Professor of the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. Alize Arıcan is a Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholar at Boston University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CUNY—City College, focusing on urban renewal, futurity, care, and migration. You can find her on Twitter @alizearican. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Extracting lessons for our current age, Christopher Lazarski focuses on liberty--how Acton understood it, what he thought was its foundation and necessary ingredients, and the history of its development in Western Civilization.Acton is known as a historian, or even the historian, of liberty and as an ardent liberal, but there is confusion as to how he understood liberty and what kind of liberalism he professed.Lord Acton for Our Time (Northern Illinois University Press, 2023) provides an introduction that presents essentials about Acton's life and recovers his theory of liberalism. Lazarski analyzes Acton's type of liberalism, probing whether it can offer a solution to the crisis of liberal democracy in our own era. For Acton, liberty is the freedom to do what we ought to do, both as individuals and as citizens, and his writings contain valuable lessons for today.Christopher Lazarski is Professor of Politics and History at Lazarski University.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Danger Sound Klaxon!:The Horn That Changed History (University of Virginia Press, 2023) reveals the untold story of the Klaxon automobile horn, one of the first great electrical consumer technologies of the twentieth century. Although its metallic shriek at first shocked pedestrians, savvy advertising strategies convinced consumers across the United States and western Europe to adopt the shrill Klaxon horn as the safest signaling technology available in the 1910s. The widespread use of Klaxons in the trenches of World War I, however, transformed how veterans heard this car horn, and its traumatic association with gas attacks ultimately doomed this once ubiquitous consumer technology.By charting the meteoric rise and eventual fall of the Klaxon, Dr. Matthew Jordan highlights how perceptions of sound-producing technologies are guided by, manipulated, and transformed through advertising strategies, public debate, consumer reactions, and governmental regulations. Jordan demonstrates in this fascinating history how consumers are led toward technological solutions for problems themselves created by technology.Dr. Jordan also directs the News Literacy Initiative, including co-hosting its podcast News Over Noise.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose forthcoming book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

When one thinks of your typical horror movie and it’s usual imagery, a number of tropes may come forward. Graveyards behind old cathedrals, crucifixes and holy water, possessions and exorcisms. The uniting thread of all of these is that they are all tied to the religious. One might then wonder if there is some underlying thread of meaning beneath the facade.Addressing this topic directly is Jonathan Greenaway in his book Theology, Horror and Fiction: A Reading of the Gothic Nineteenth Century (Bloomsbury, 2022). Surveying a number of well known works from this period, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Bronte sisters all the way up to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Greenaway finds works filled with various references and discussions of religious scripture, imagery and themes. What’s more, he’s able to follow these various occasions down into deeper territory, finding a subterranean conversation in much of this literature on themes of embodiment, createdness, epistemology, political institutions and ethical transgression. What Greenaway comes away with is insight into a dialogue between these two fields that will be richly rewarding to believers of both of them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Æthelflæd (c. 870–918), political leader, military strategist, and administrator of law, is one of the most important ruling women in English history. Despite her multifaceted roles and family legacy, however, her reign and relationship with other women in tenth-century England have never been the subject of a book-length study. This interdisciplinary collection of essays redresses a notable hiatus in scholarship of early medieval England. Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, and Women in Tenth-Century England (Medieval Institute Publications, 2021)argues for a reassessment of women’s political, military, literary, and domestic agency. It invites deeper reflection on the female kinships, networks, and communities that give meaning to Æthelflæd’s life, and through this shows how medieval history can invite new engagements with the past.Rebecca Hardie is a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Managing Editor of the Living Handbook of Temporal Communities in the Excellence Cluster 2020 “Temporal Communities.”Becky Straple-Sovers is a medievalist and freelance editor who earned her Ph.D. in English at Western Michigan University in 2021. Her research interests include bodies, movement, gender, and sexuality in literature, as well as poetry of the First World War and the public humanities. She can be found on Twitter @restraple. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

Many scholars have struggled with Irigaray’s focus on sexuate difference, in particular with her claim that it is “ontological,” wondering if this implies a problematically naïve or essentialist account of sexuate difference. As a result, the ethical vision which Irigaray elaborates has not been taken up in a robust way in the fields of philosophy, feminism, or psychoanalysis.By tracing the notion of relation throughout Irigaray’s work, Being as Relation in Luce Irigaray (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) identifies a rigorous philosophical continuity between the three self-identified “phases” in Irigaray’s thought (despite some critics’ concerns that there is a discontinuity between these phases) and clarifies the relational ontology that underlies Irigaray’s conceptualization of sexuate difference – one that always already implies an ethical project.Jones demonstrates that an understanding of Irigaray’s Heideggerian inheritance – especially prominent in her later texts – is essential to grasping the sense of the idea that sexuate difference is ontological – it concerns Being, rather than beings. This book further develops potential applications of this ontological notion of a “relational limit” for the fields of philosophy, feminism, and psychotherapy.Emma R. Jones is a psychotherapist in private practice in the San Francisco East Bay Area. She was educated at the New School, the University of Oregon, where she earned her PhD in philosophy; and the California Institute of Integral studies, where she earned her clinical degree. She is the author of several articles engaging the work of Luce Irigaray as well as phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and ancient Greek philosophy.Helena Vissing, PsyD, SEP, PMH-C is a Licensed Psychologist practicing in California. She can be reached at contact@helenavissing.com. She is the author of Somatic Maternal Healing: Psychodynamic and Somatic Treatment of Trauma in the Perinatal Period (Routledge, 2023). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies